It's gone well beyond the 'tech press' over the past few days. Even a few 'regular people' are Bing ... ing.
Those using the MSN.com front page have already seen the switch:
The 80+ million dollar Microsoft Bing ad campaign is now well under way.
On the web, Bing ads can now be found on news sites (and many others) premiering the new 'decision engine' with animated searches for answers such as the one below running this morning on WashingtonPost.com :
The TV campaign is growing as well, not only in major markets. but in rural (US) markets as well.
This is one of the new Bing ads (as seen on YouTube):
Bing is even running PPC ads on Google !
There are 'Bingers' on Twitter .... and more.
Opinions from the Tech community seem to be improving as Bing fine-tunes their results a bit.
Former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble (currently working with RackSpace) kicked off a discussion on Friendfeed last night here.
There are many other discussions going on around the web with the initial mixed reactions turning mostly positive.
Can Bing challenge Google?
While I doubt 'Bing-it' will ever enter the vernacular ... an 80 million dollar ad campaign spread out across numerous media spaces will definitely keep the buzz alive for a while.
The questions become .... Will the buzz continue (and 'stick'?). Will Google, at any stage, feel a need to counter the massive advertising? ... and ... despite discounting most of it publicly so far ..... Could Yahoo lose their prized front page position on many desktops?
More importantly ....
Have you .. ugh ... 'Bung' yet?
Great weekend all
Charlie